Dealers look ahead to eRetailer event

The Home Improvement eRetailer Summit is less than six months away, and leading dealers registered to attend already are anticipating its benefits.

“The eRetailer Summit provides an ideal forum to share key insights and trends that are evolving within the home improvement landscape,” said Alyssa Steele, VP of merchandising for eBay, who will be going for the second time. “As the lines of offline and online commerce continue to blur, it’s important for manufacturers and retailers to ensure an effective distribution strategy within today’s competitive environment.”

Jim Carpenter, Director of Marketing for Curtis Lumber, a 21-yard LBM dealer based in Ballston Spa, N.Y., said he’s looking forward to attending his first Summit “to better understand how our regional, family-owned, company can transition into integrated retail and grow for the future. Our industry has traditionally taken longer to adapt to changing trends in the marketplace and I’d rather be ahead of this curve than behind it.”

The Summit, now in its third year, is a unique event that provides a 360-degree panorama of ecommerce by including, among its presenters and keynote speakers, leaders from the worlds of manufacturing, distribution, retailing, service providers, and the business media.

This year’s agenda and educational sessions are informed by input from the Summit’s six-person Advisory Council whose members include executives from a diverse group of online practitioners. The goal of this event is to help its attendees expand their online presence through collaboration and partnerships.

“This Summit was designed to help the entire home improvement retail channel focus on understanding the internet as a distribution channel, and to become more competitive by understanding and capturing the growth opportunity of Home Improvement ecommerce,” said Sonya Ruff Jarvis, the Summit’s Founder.

At Pro Group, a healthy schedule

Denver-based PRO Group has been busy in recent months, onboarding new members Village Supply of Ceres, Calif.; and fine-tuning an alliance with Val-Test. The group will remain busy at a variety of events on its show-date calendar.

A major one will be the 2018 Group Merchandising Conference in Atlanta, June 18-20. That will bring together the family of distributors and co-ops for three days of carefully organized buying at the Embassy Suites Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park.

Next up on world stage: Spoga+Gafa

The trade show people at Koelnmesse have a growing story to tell.

The sprawling Koelnmesse convention center in Cologne, Germany, home of the every-other-year Eisenwarenmesse – or International Hardware Fair – is investing 700 million euros on an improvement project. The mission is not to get bigger, but to get better, said Stefan Lohrberg of Koelnmesse.

Part of the project involves a new entrance to the facility and a conference/exhibit area designed for flexible meetings and networking events, both large and small.

In 2020 a revamped Hall no. 1 will greet visitors to the Eisenwarenmesse show. More immediately, Spoga+Gafa, billed as the world’s largest lawn and garden and outdoor living show, is expecting 2,132 exhibitors from 59 countries for its Sept. 2-4 show in Cologne.

As part of the trade show company’s culture of innovation, Koelnmesse says it plans to expand its “theme platforms,” a term used to describe special areas of interest. “Exhibitors of the future want to have added value,” Lohrberg said, during his visit to the National Hardware Show in Las Vegas. “Certainly, meeting with people is the most important thing, but businesses today want added value.”

Lohrberg said he was impressed with the activity at the National Hardware Show’s Inventor’s Alley, which showcases the creativity for which U.S. shows are famous.

At Spoga+Gafa, those platforms will include “islands” of POS Green solutions; Akku (battery powered) & Smart Gardening World; Outdoor Kitchen World and a “Carousel of furniture.”

Promoting international trade is a major mission of the Koelnmesse group. The first step is to help people imagine trade, he said. “People think that there are more barriers than there really are,” Lohrberg said. “And trade shows are very good at building bridges.”

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